Can This Conversation Be Saved?

What follows is a very special blog post. It’s the first of several drawn from a new project that we’re really excited about: what we hope will become the first published book based on SAVI. We’re starting off with text from the introduction, and after that we’ll move on to Chapter 2 (on Yes-Buts). Now, more than ever, we’re very eager to get your feedback. You, loyal blog readers, will be the first to read and review this material. Please let us know what you think — what you like, what you don’t like, and any edits or additions you’d like to see. As soon as we have these two chapters completed, we’re ready to go look for a publisher. Help us create a proposal that they can’t refuse!

Thanks in advance! We hope you’ll enjoy reading this as much as we’ve enjoyed writing it.

Introduction:
Can This Conversation Be Saved?
The Surprising Common Factor in all Communication Breakdowns

Communication breakdowns are bad news for our lives and work, and even our health. At best, they’re a source of irritation and frustration. At worst, they can threaten our jobs, families, and friendships — and in some cases, even our lives. Research shows that communication failures are the leading cause of serious medical errors.

How can we go about improving our conversations? First we need to get clear about exactly what’s going wrong. We can’t solve a problem if we don’t know what’s causing it. And when it comes to communication issues, the cause is often tricky to spot.

Consider the following dialogue, taken from an actual conversation that took place between the daughter of a patient (call her Sarah) and the patient’s physician (Dr. M) at a major Boston hospital. As you read it, see if you can figure out what’s causing the trouble in their communication:

Sarah began by saying, “It’s so upsetting to see my father in this condition. I know this is not how he wanted to spend the last days of his life.”
“I’m very sorry,” replied Dr. M, emotionless.
“I think it’s finally time to take him off the respirator.”
“I can see how you’d feel that way now,” said Dr. M, “but this new medication may start to improve his quality of life.”
“At this point, that’s just not enough. He’s never going to get to the point where life is worth living again.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to wait and be sure?”
“We’ve waited so long already,” said Sarah, whining now, “and nothing has helped!”
Still very calm, Dr. M said, “The morphine has helped to make him more comfortable, and his breathing seems a little easier today.”
“Look,” said Sarah, exasperated, “I just can’t talk to you about this anymore!”

What’s going on here? What made that conversation so difficult? When we present this dialogue in our communications trainings, people usually come up with two different types of explanations: blaming the people and blaming the issue. In fact, these are the most common reasons people give for any type of communication failure. Unfortunately, neither one is particularly useful.

Explanation #1. Blaming the People
If you blamed the problem on Dr. M or on Sarah, you’re using the people explanation. From this point of view, communications break down because of psychological factors, such as:

• Personality traits or attitudes
  Dave is too closed-minded. Rachel is defensive. The employees have a negative attitude. Andy and Karen are passive aggressive.
  
  
• Intentions or motivations
  Paul isn’t really interested in what we have to say. People have hidden agendas. Ann always spends the entire meeting trying to win people over to her side. Carlos is more concerned with making Jamie look bad than with finding a solution to the problem.
  
  
• Emotional state
  The customer gets way too emotional. Angela lets her anger get out of control. Matt is out of touch with his emotions; he says all the right things, but you can tell he doesn’t really feel it.

In the hospital case, we might decide there’s something wrong with Dr. M (he’s cold and insensitive; he just wants Sarah to agree with him and doesn’t care about her point of view) or with Sarah (maybe she’s too emotional, too stubborn, or too pessimistic).

The psychological perspective has a strong intuitive appeal. It may seem like basic common sense — of course people’s bad attitudes, hidden agendas, and raging emotions ruin conversations; you can probably think of a few examples off the top of your head. However, this type of thinking also leaves us in a bind, with no good way to solve our problems.

Suppose you decide that the real trouble with your communication is someone else’s defensiveness or overemotional reaction. That’s not something you have the power to control. In fact, if you try to control it and force the person to change, you’re likely to make things even worse. If you don’t believe us, ask anybody who’s tried to resolve an argument by saying things like, “Stop being so defensive,” “Calm down,” or “You need to relax.” (Imagine what would have happened if Dr. M told Sarah to be more rational, or if she told him to show some feeling.) Moreover, even if it were possible to make someone change — perhaps by convincing them to get some coaching or go into therapy — that’s a long-term process. It’s not an efficient or practical strategy for making your conversations work better.

Sometimes it may seem like the only solution is to get the difficult person out of your life — quit the job, fire the employee, seek a divorce, etc. If you haven’t gone through this type of thought process yourself, you certainly know people who have. You probably know more than one person who’s acted on that reasoning, only to end up having the exact same conflicts a few months later in their new relationship or job situation. And of course, it’s often just not possible to exclude someone from your life. In our example, so long as Dr. M is caring for Sarah’s father, they have no choice but to talk to one another.

In our next post, we’ll explore explanation #2 — blaming the issues — and then reveal the real reason behind communication breakdowns. Stay tuned!

Unraveling a workplace mystery: Why is your employee snapping at you?

In this post, we’re going to tell the story of a real-life incident that happened several months ago in a local office. We’d like you to put yourself in the position of the supervisor, trying to figure out what’s going on with his employee. As you read, ask yourself what you can conclude about the employee’s personality and mindset.


The Problem
One afternoon last fall, this supervisor (call him Brian) was working closely with one of his employees (Amanda) to complete a straightforward, if somewhat tedious task — identifying, labeling, and sorting a long series of electronic files. The files were photographs, and only Brian could determine what they were and where they needed to go. Amanda’s job was to bring the files up on the screen for the supervisor to see, and then label and organize them as directed.

For the first hour things seemed to go smoothly. They managed to organize about 20% of the images before taking a break for Brian to attend a meeting. But the next time they met, after just 10 minutes Brian started noticing a change in Amanda’s attitude. Her answers to his requests (“Can you make this image larger?” “Can you show me that last one again?”) became increasingly curt and abrupt. When he tried to give her suggestions (“How about making a new folder for that?”), she snapped back, “I know!” or “Okay, I’m doing it.” After about an hour of this, Brian started becoming quite irritated himself. He suggested taking a break and went back to his office to try to figure out what might be happening. He had never known Amanda to be so rude, but then again, she did much of her technical work independently, without anyone telling her what to do.

Before we tell you what came next, try for a moment to consider what might account for Amanda’s behavior. What might she be thinking about this task or about Brian? What type of personality traits might lead her to respond so harshly in this situation? What might her intention be here? And how should that affect the way Brian responds?

Finding Answers
Do you have some thoughts? Good. If you followed our suggestions in thinking about this issue, you may have come up with some interesting hypotheses about Amanda — maybe she resents being told what to do; she thinks this task is beneath her; or she’s edgy in general and doesn’t work well with others. Maybe she wants to get Brian to be less directive, or even wants him to get so irritated that he’ll go away and get out of her hair. What should Brian do? Find a way to let her do this project more independently? Give her feedback about her attitude? Offer a stern warning?

Let’s look at what Brian actually did. First let’s look at what he didn’t do. He had some guesses about what might be happening with Amanda (based on his experiences working with her for a number of years), but he did not assume that any of them were true. Instead, he decided to engage Amanda in a conversation about what was happening. Also, he did not focus his attention solely on what was going on with Amanda; rather, he asked her to help him figure out what was happening in their interaction — which was a product of both of their actions. (Of course, this is the exact opposite of what we asked you to do; we wanted you to be able to compare the different sorts of conclusions these two methods produce.)

Talking together in this way, these two people came up with answers that surprised both of them. Initially, Amanda couldn’t explain what was going on. She was aware of feeling very irritated, but didn’t know why. It was only by thinking through the events together that they identified the factors that had led to her irritation — and there had been quite a few:

• Technical slowdowns: There were several steps to manipulating the files, and they took longer than Brian realized. As a result, he would often give instructions on a new task before Amanda had completed the previous one, so she had to rush to get both of them done.
• Perceived time pressure: Amanda interpreted Brian’s rushed instructions as an indication that he was in a hurry, which increased her level of stress.
• Actual time pressure: The second time they got together, they only had 30 minutes to work before Brian had to leave for another meeting.
• Phone interruptions: Several times, Brian answered the phone in the middle of the organizing work. When he was finished, it took them both some time to get re-oriented to exactly where they’d left off. This added further to the stress of the real and perceived time pressures.
• Startling interruptions: Periodically, as Amanda was scrolling through images, Brian would reach over to point at the screen and say, “Wait!” or “That one there!”, which startled Amanda and kept her stress level climbing.

This was a wonderful realization, because it pointed so easily to solutions — solutions much more effective (and pleasant) than a stern warning. For instance:

• Technical slowdowns could be anticipated. Instead of jumping ahead, Brian learned to wait until Amanda said she was ready to move on.
• Perceived time pressure was reduced by Brian explaining that he was not actually in a hurry. (In SAVI terms, Amanda learned that her Mind-read of him was inaccurate.)
• Actual time pressure was minimized by waiting until they had a longer stretch of time to work together.
• Phone interruptions were eliminated by simply ignoring the phone during this period of work.
• Startling interruptions were minimized by Brian holding back, keeping his interruptions quieter and less intrusive. (Just gaining some awareness helped; he hadn’t realized what he’d been doing.)

With these changes, the irritability problem was solved. Amanda apologized for being curt and rude, Brian apologized for unknowingly creating a stressful situation, and they easily moved on.

We like this story because it provides a good illustration of the value of a collaborative problem-solving approach (What’s wrong here?), as opposed to a solely person-focused approach (What’s wrong with her?). It also has some personal meaning for us. As we mentioned earlier, this is an entirely true story. Brian and Amanda are yours truly — Ben Benjamin and Amy Yeager.

Easy on the Ear: Cognitive Fluency and Communication

Think about this description:
The less effort it takes to understand something, the more they like it. Whatever comes most easily is what they find to be the most beautiful, trustworthy, and true. In fact, difficulty makes them nervous and uncomfortable — leading them to be less forthcoming and make harsher moral judgments.

Who are these simplicity-loving slackers?


Our brains.

A recent article in the Boston Globe explored the concept of cognitive fluency, the ease with which a stimulus — whether it’s a sentence, an object, an image, or a more complex experience — can be processed by the human brain. It turns out that cognitive fluency can bestow a wide range of favorable qualities on something, or someone. A woman whose facial features are easy to process visually will tend to look more attractive. A company whose name is easy to pronounce will sound like a better investment. And a catchy saying that’s easy to remember will be more believable than the same idea conveyed in more challenging language.

This phenomenon leads to some surprising results. For instance, just using a more legible font can lead readers to respond more honestly on a questionnaire, or to judge a moral transgression more leniently.

What does cognitive fluency have to do with SAVI? We were excited to learn about this research, as it applies to communication, because it helps to reinforce two key principles of SAVI:

1) What you say is often less influential than how you say it.
Factors that have nothing to do with the content or value of your message can have a tremendous impact on how other people will receive it. An idea might be a big hit if presented in bright, legible text, and yet meet with resistance if given in a font that’s hard to read. In the same way, voicing an idea as a simple proposal (e.g., “Let’s clean out the basement this weekend”) is quite different from presenting it through mind-reading and yes-butting (e.g., “I know you’d rather just forget about it [Mind-read], but [Yes-but] let’s clean out the basement this weekend”).

2) One of the most important aspects of how you say something is its effect on information transfer — how easy or difficult it is for information to get through.
In SAVI, we talk about ambiguity, contradiction, and redundancy as noise — features of verbal communication that interfere with the transfer of information. (For instance, a Yes-but introduces noise by giving two contradictory messages at the same time.) Noise tends to increase stress and frustration. However, it isn’t inherently wrong or bad; depending on your goal, you might sometimes want to use noisy communication. For example, even though interruptions add noise (contradicting what someone else is saying by moving in a different direction), they are sometimes essential for refocusing a conversation when it gets off track.

We can say similar things about other sorts of noise. For instance, as this article explains, any factor that interferes with the flow of visual information (like an illegible font) will tend to increase wariness and discomfort. However, this increased vigilance can be useful in certain circumstances. If you’re trying to get readers to think carefully and catch mistakes, cognitive disfluency may be just what you need. (See page 4 of the article for details.)

There’s one other important observation we could make here. Part of what makes fluency and disfluency effects so interesting is that they operate beneath our level of awareness. If you ask people why they invested in a particular business, they’re unlikely to mention the easy pronunciation of company’s name. Likewise, if you ask someone why she didn’t like her husband’s suggestion to clean the basement, she probably won’t mention the noise in the communication (e.g., “The contradiction in the mind-read and the yes-but left me feeling frustrated and annoyed”). Instead, she’s much more likely to criticize the proposal (“It’s a bad idea”) or her husband (“He’s so pushy”).

This points to the value of education and training. Learning more about the factors that influence our actions and reactions can help us to make more informed decisions. For instance, we might be a little wary of claims that have a “ring of truth” — which may have more to do with their catchy phrasing than their substantive value. And we might make a conscious effort to look beyond the way our spouses, or friends, or colleagues present their suggestions. There could be a useful proposal hidden inside their yes-buts. Maybe cleaning the basement is not such a bad idea after all.


A final note: As we talk about ease and fluency in conversations, it’s important to be clear about for whom things are fluent and easy: the listener. Cognitively fluent communication is easier to receive, but not necessarily easier to produce. In fact, it’s generally easier to talk in a noisy (ambiguous, redundant, contradictory) way than it is to talk in ways that reduce noise. Why is that? Stay tuned for details in our next post!

Gender & Communication

The question of how gender affects communication has been a hot topic for a long time, and it’s one that comes up fairly often in our workshops. After a recent presentation we gave, one woman came up to us and asked whether certain communication patterns commonly break down along gender lines. In particular, she was curious about the complaint-proposal pattern (see our earlier posts on this topic, starting here). It seemed to her that at least in heterosexual couples, it was often the female who complained and the male who made proposals.

Our first, superficial answer is: That may be true. We haven’t done any formal research, but from our own experience, we have observed a variety of gender differences in communication patterns. If such differences do exist, we could speculate about possible reasons why. An individual’s communication might be influenced by any or all of the following gender-related factors:

• Imitation and social influences. Whether consciously or unconsciously, girls may model their communication styles after those of their female relatives and female peer groups, and boys may do the same with other males. We could imagine, for example, that females might observe and imitate a tendency to ask more personal questions, while males might be exposed to less personal, topic-focused questions.

• Neurophysiological differences. Women and men differ significantly in the relative size and activity of various regions of the brain, as well as in the flow of hormones that influence brain activity. If, as some have speculated, women have a larger proportion of mirror neurons (brain cells involved in empathy, feeling what another person is feeling), this might lead them to use more mirroring communication than men. (See our last post for an explanation of mirroring.) As another example, men’s larger amygdala (which triggers aggression, among other things) and smaller prefrontal cortex (which helps keep the amygdala in check) could potentially lead to a greater tendency to verbally attack and blame others.

• Larger social structures. The woman at our presentation raised the possibility that a relatively lower status in a particular organization, or in the society as a whole, may make females more likely to complain. There might very well be some truth in this. Complaints are associated with a sense of helplessness. In a situation where men have significantly more power and influence, women may experience more of that helplessness and therefore tend to complain more. (In a situation where women had greater power, the communication patterns may be reversed.)

Any of these speculations could be tested by research, using SAVI coding and other tools. (In coding, we record the SAVI behaviors being used every 3 seconds to get a comprehensive view of a communication pattern.) For instance, we could code conversations in largely male-led vs. female-led companies to test for gender differences in the frequency of complaints.

Certainly, looking at the impact of gender can give us a new perspective on what causes communication to succeed or fail. How useful is this perspective? We’d argue that it brings both benefits and risks. Potential benefits include:

• Greater patience and tolerance. Say we find solid evidence that men have an inherent neurophysiological disadvantage in mirroring. The men among us who don’t mirror feelings very well could take heart that this is not an isolated, personal failing. Meanwhile, the women in their lives might be somewhat more patient and forgiving as they struggle to develop that capacity. In general, seeing all of our unproductive communication habits in a larger context — influenced by powerful biological and social forces — might help us to take them less personally.

• Increased social awareness. If we can isolate factors that contribute to communication problems, we can take steps to mitigate their effects. For instance, if we learn that boys don’t get much exposure to a particular type of useful communication, we can make a special effort to teach it to them. We could even use communication patterns as a warning sign of deeper structural problems. If a link does exist between power imbalances and complaints, frequent complaining by female (or male) employees in a particular department or organization could suggest that women (or men) are disempowered within that group.

Now for the risks. These are not arguments for ignoring gender issues, just cautions about the types of conclusions we draw and the way we apply them to individual cases. Potential dangers include:

• Overestimating the role of gender-related factors. Gender is only one factor among many that may influence how a person communicates. Whatever we can say about how men and women differ in general, those findings will never apply to all individuals or all situations.

• Viewing gender-influenced tendencies as fixed. When we start to analyze communication in terms of what women do and what men do, there’s a danger of seeing these as fixed — simply determined by evolution or our hormones or our culture. In fact, no matter what caused us to communicate the way we do now, we can always learn to do things differently in the future,

• Focusing on people rather than behavior. This brings us back to a key principle in SAVI: what causes a conversation to succeed or fail is not who the people are (their gender, personality traits, motivation, etc.), but rather what the people do. Certain ways of communicating (complaining, Yes-butting, asking leading questions, etc.) will tend to cause trouble no matter who uses them. If a couple gets stuck in a complaint-proposal cycle, it doesn’t matter who’s complaining and who’s proposing. In fact, it’s not uncommon to see people switch roles in these sorts of patterns — one day Carol complains and Jim responds with proposals, and the next day Jim starts complaining and Carol makes proposals.

It may turn out that considerations of gender are most useful to us when we’re trying to understand why people have developed particular patterns of communicating. When it comes to trying to change patterns that are already established, we can take a more unisex approach. Our basic underlying strategy for changing communication behavior — supported by research in neuroscience (see our earlier post) — is perfectly egalitarian. No matter who you are and what factors shaped your ways of communicating, the key is to address whatever you’re doing right now that’s not working: build an awareness of what you’re doing; find a new, more constructive alternative; and practice that new alternative again and again, until it becomes the new norm. In this way, you can work to improve your conversations not just with the opposite sex, but with every person in your life.

Responding to Grief, Loss, and Disappointment — Part 2

In our last post, we talked about how not to respond to a person suffering from grief, loss, or disappointment. Now let’s look at the other side of the story: what type of communication is likely to be more effective in this situation.

The primary guideline is one that we come back to frequently in our advice about various tough conversations: When a person says something that’s emotionally charged (whether with anger, frustration, fear, or sadness) it’s often a good idea to respond by attuning to them — showing that you’ve heard and understood their emotional message. In SAVI, we call this mirroring.

Note that mirroring shows understanding, and doesn’t just state it. If a friend tells you she’s feeling depressed and lonely after a breakup, simply saying, “I understand” or “I know how you feel” is not mirroring. Those statements give no evidence that you really know what she’s feeling — particularly if your voice tone stays neutral or flat. In contrast, a true mirror would reflect back both the sadness in your friend’s voice tone and the content she has expressed. To reflect the content, you could either use some of the same words (“So since the breakup, you’ve been feeling lonely and depressed”) or rephrase what you heard (“I can hear how painful this has been for you”). What’s important is to show that you understand the core emotional message that’s coming through. That will only happen if the mirroring is authentic, with the words sincerely felt.

Benefits of Mirroring
Mirroring the other person’s experience can bring several important benefits:

• Emotional shift. Because of the way human beings are wired (our neuropsychological makeup), simply attuning to someone’s negative emotion tends to foster more positive emotions.
• Reduced frustration and alienation. When someone is upset, there’s nothing more frustrating than the feeling that nobody else understands what he or she is going through. This can add a sense of loneliness and isolation to whatever difficult emotions the person is already experiencing. Mirroring helps to avoid this issue. Even if nothing else changes, a sense of truly being understood is often a substantial relief. As we mentioned earlier, the mirror must be authentic for this to happen; an insincere attempt is apt to make the person feel worse, rather than better.
• Potential for a shift in focus. Although we sometimes confront grief and loss in isolated settings devoted solely to that purpose (e.g., a funeral or wake, or a whole evening set aside to commiserate with friends), these feelings often emerge in other contexts where we have conflicting obligations. Perhaps you’re empathizing with a coworker, but also need to work together with her on a project; or you’re comforting a relative whose child is sick, but also need to help him make important medical decisions. It may be necessary, and even emotionally beneficial, for the individual who’s upset to focus on something different for a while. Because of the previously mentioned benefits (helping to soothe negative feelings, reduce frustration, and provide a sense of being heard), a person who has been effectively mirrored may have an easier time shifting focus to other topics. Of course, there are no guarantees, and it may take an extended period of mirroring before someone calms down enough to think clearly. But this approach definitely increases the odds of success.
• Straightforward approach. This benefit is for the individual who’s doing the mirroring. You don’t have to worry about saying the “right words” or coming up with something original and inspired to comfort the other person. All you have to do is listen and reflect back what you’re hearing. This is not to say that mirroring is easy. The ability to attune to someone else’s emotions is an acquired skill, and for many (if not most) of us, it is not a natural first reaction. It generally takes practice to do it effectively. But once you’ve developed that ability, it’s a relatively straightforward matter to put it into practice.

Beyond Mirroring
Mirroring is one type of communication that SAVI identifies as “resonating,” dealing directly with emotions or other deeply meaningful information. There are also other ways to resonate, which can be particularly useful after you’ve mirrored first.

Sharing your own inner feeling. While a mirror is focused on the other person, an inner feeling focuses on you and how you feel. Just as with mirroring, it is important for genuine emotion to come through in your voice tone. You might say, with empathy, “I’m so sorry you’re going through this” or “I really feel for you — just hearing about that brings tears to my eyes.” You might also share feelings that are somewhat different from what the other person expressed: “I feel frustrated that I can’t do anything to make this better” or “I’m so angry with her for leaving you this way/not giving you a chance/making the wrong diagnosis/etc.” Just keep in mind that these are your emotions, and the other person may not share them. If they are quite different from what that person is feeling, you might not want to emphasize them too heavily, lest you draw too much attention onto yourself and away from the person you’re trying to support.

Asking a feeling question. In addition to reflecting someone’s emotions and sharing your own, you might want to learn more about what’s happening for this other person. You can do this with a feeling question — a type of question that deals with deeply personal, meaningful issues. In asking such a question, there is often a sense of taking a risk or going out on a limb. Here are a few examples of feeling questions: “Are you angry with him?” “Do you feel safe being alone in the house tonight?” “Do you feel ready to come back to work, or is it too soon?” “Would you be comfortable with my telling Karen about what’s going on?” “Is it helpful to have me here, or would you rather be alone?”

Putting it all Together
Here is an example of how you might use these strategies to respond to one of the scenarios we introduced in the last post:

Scenario: Your friend tells you that he has just lost his job, and is feeling insecure about his professional competence and his prospects for his future.

(All comments below are made with an empathetic voice tone)
I can hear this is really scary — you lost something that you’ve relied on not just for financial security, but also for your sense of identity and competence. (Mirror)
I’m so sorry that you’re going through this. (Inner feeling) I care about you, and want to be there as a support in any way I can. (Inner feeling)
What would be most helpful for you right now? (Feeling question)

As we mentioned earlier, it’s often not possible to devote long periods of time to purely emotional discussions. And that’s not necessarily what’s best for someone dealing with grief and loss. While a certain amount of attunement can help soothe negative emotions, that doesn’t mean that the more you empathize, the better the other person will feel. In fact, if you keep it going for too long, you might both wind up spiraling into despair. But at least as a start, for beginning one of these conversations, a combination of mirroring, sharing inner feelings, and/or asking feeling questions is the most effective strategy we have found.

At first, it might be quite challenging to respond in this way. Talking about deeply sad topics can be both upsetting and frustrating. When someone we care about is in distress, it’s natural to want to help, to make the situation a little better, to do something. It can feel inadequate to just listen and empathize — which is one reason why people commonly resort to positive predictions and the other types of ineffective comments we discussed in the last post. But the truth is, we usually can’t change the current reality, and we can’t predict the future; we simply don’t have the power to make things better. Often, listening and empathizing is all we can do. At these times, that just might be the greatest gift we can give.

Small Consolation

How NOT to Respond to Others’ Grief, Loss, and Disappointment

When we train organizational teams in SAVI, we talk about many different types of difficult conversations — from boring meetings to heated arguments. In this post, we’ll focus on one communication challenge that we often don’t get to cover: responding to someone who expresses feelings of grief, loss, or disappointment. While such conversations may not occur frequently in work settings, we all find ourselves engaged in them from time to time, and many of us have great difficulty handling them effectively. In fact, some of the most common attempts to be supportive can easily make the other person feel worse, rather than better. We’ll look at a few of these here, before considering more helpful alternatives.

Common Response #1. Imagining the Positive
Suppose you’ve just lost your job, and you’re devastated. It’s a big blow to your self-esteem and threatens your sense of security for the future. You share this with your friend, and she responds by saying, “I know things will work out well in the end. Within a month you’ll have five job offers.” Or, “This is just temporary. The industry is bound to recover soon.” How does that make you feel?

In all likelihood, the friend in this scenario has only good, altruistic intentions: trying to help you feel better and shift your focus from distressing worries to hopeful possibilities. Nevertheless, these sorts of comments are unlikely to feel truly reassuring. We can use the SAVI framework to understand why.

Using SAVI, we can identify your friend’s statements as Positive predictions — assumptions about the future, stated as if they were facts. Responding to any deeply emotional message with a Positive prediction is inherently problematic. First of all, the prediction avoids the core issue: the person’s feelings (e.g., in this case, feeling hurt, vulnerable, upset, and worried). Instead it focuses on concrete events or circumstances (getting a job offer, improvements in the economy, and so on). It also avoids the present reality (unemployment), focusing instead on what will happen in the future. And since none of us can know the future, Positive predictions are always in some sense misrepresentations. Those five job offers are not real facts about the world; they are just your friend’s projections. It should come as no surprise that imaginary future events thought up by somebody else cannot override the very real feelings you’re experiencing right now.

Common Response #2. Using All the Right Words (As Seen on TV)
Now consider a different scenario. Your father has just died, after a long and debilitating illness, and you’re struggling with grief as you return to work the following week. As your colleagues find out, they offer various expressions of sympathy, such as “I’m sorry for your loss,” “My condolences,” “At least his suffering is over,” and “He’s in a better place now” — all with no feeling in their voice tone. Do you feel comforted? Probably not.

Again, we can apply SAVI to help us understand what’s happening. These remarks are all examples of Ritual communication: predictable, socially determined phrases stated with little or no emotion. We pick up these conventional expressions from our culture, learning the “right thing” to say from movies, books, and television, as well as from direct social interactions. Anyone who enjoys watching police procedurals like Law & Order has probably heard “I’m sorry for your loss” hundreds of times.

Now, just because people respond to you with Rituals, that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t care. In our example, it might be that some of your coworkers freeze up and get uncomfortable talking about emotional issues. They might rely on seemingly safe, standard phrases because they’re afraid of saying the wrong thing and making you more upset. The point is, you simply can’t tell what they’re feeling. At a time when you really need emotional connection, an emotionally flat, automatic response may just add to your distress.

Common Response #3. Delivering the Universal Truth
Have you ever received upsetting health news, and then found the people around you starting to act like medical experts? For instance, maybe you just learned that your child needs surgery, or you’ve been diagnosed with a serious injury or chronic disease. As you’re grappling with the emotional impact of that information, some of your family members jump in to share their unsolicited, dogmatic opinions. Each person conveys a clear impression that he or she knows exactly what you should do: “You need to get a second opinion right away.” “You really ought to join a support group.” “You have to go see this great acupuncturist I know.” “The only way you’ll turn this around is by changing your lifestyle habits.”

Would this advice help to calm or reassure you? While some of the ideas might potentially be helpful, the way they’re presented — as what we call “Oughtitudes” — makes it difficult to use them. SAVI defines an Oughtitude as “[c]omments expressing non-hostile superiority, dogmatic value judgments, rules about life, generalizations that imply universal ‘rightness’ and that the speaker has a direct line to the absolute truth which everybody ‘ought to know…’” These types of communication provide a very strong push in a particular direction, not leaving room for any doubt or opposing opinions. And of course, as with the other responses we looked at, they do nothing to address the emotions involved; instead of acknowledging what’s happening for you right now, they skip ahead to what you ought to be doing.

Common Response #4. Talking You Out of It
Imagine that you’re facing the end of a close relationship, whether it’s a divorce, separation, or break-up. You might experience a wide range of painful thoughts and feelings — from grief and despair to identity issues to fears about how the other person will manage without you. (We’ll leave out anger, resentment, and outrage, as they are less relevant to this discussion and raise other complications.) You talk to your friends, who care about you and so naturally don’t want you to go through this pain. When they hear what you’re thinking and feeling, they try to talk you out of it: “Don’t be so hard on yourself.” “You shouldn’t feel that way.” “There’s nothing to feel guilty about.” Sometimes their comments might be a little more subtle: “I totally understand why it seems that way, but that’s because you’re so upset right now” or “I know she’s having a hard time, but it’s really not your fault.” As the conversation continues, you find yourself shifting from sharing your feelings to having an argument. What’s going on?

When we coach people who report being on the other end of these dialogues — making failed attempts at reassurance — they often can’t understand what went wrong. They were trying so hard to be helpful, and instead of being appreciative, or at least feeling a little better, the other person started fighting with them. Once more we can turn to SAVI for insight. Statements like “You shouldn’t feel that way” or “Don’t be so hard on yourself” are Discounts, denying the value of the thoughts or feelings someone else has expressed. The intention behind a Discount may be kind and supportive, but the message that comes through most clearly is “You’re wrong.” Yes-Buts have a similar effect. The person gives a token agreement (e.g., “I know it seems that way”), followed by a contradictory opinion (“but it’s not true,” “but things will get better in time,” “but you haven’t considered…” etc.). Again, the core message that gets communicated is that this person knows better than you do what you should be thinking or feeling. No matter what the context, that’s a message that’s likely to lead to an argument.

Uncommon Sense
We mentioned earlier that these four types of responses are extremely common. Do you recognize any of them as the kinds of things people have said to you, or that you yourself have a tendency to say? When you’re on the receiving end of such comments, it’s pretty obvious that they aren’t what you need to hear. At best they’re simply not helpful, and at worst they can be downright infuriating. Yet when it’s you who needs to respond to someone experiencing grief or loss, you might find those same infuriating comments coming out of your mouth. That’s certainly happened to both of us. To be able to respond effectively, it’s not enough to know what not to say; we need to have a sense of what alternative responses would be more helpful. While there’s no “right” response, we can recommend several options that have much greater potential for success than Positive predictions, Rituals, Oughtitudes, Discounts, or Yes-Buts. Stay tuned for details in our next post, coming soon!

In the meantime, as 2009 comes to a close, we wish you all peace, health, happiness, and conversations that just get better and better.

What It Takes to Be an Expert

Lately we’ve been thinking a lot about the question of mastery: what it takes to become an expert — in terms of managing difficult conversations, or any other type of skilled activity. The issue came up last week in a phone seminar with an organizational group that has received a great deal of SAVI training. We spent much of our time discussing a recent meeting where two participants had encountered some difficulty in their roles as meeting facilitators. Together as a group, we analyzed what had gone wrong, how these individuals had responded, and what they might do differently in the future.

At the end of our discussion, one of the other participants expressed concern about the state of meeting facilitation in the organization. Nobody on the staff was an expert, she said. Despite a couple of years of experience, they still sometimes ran into problems they didn’t know how to solve. What could they do about this?

Our answer: Exactly what they had just been doing.

The latest research on mastery gives clear guidance about what it takes to become an expert — whether you’re a meeting facilitator or a ballplayer, violinist, salesperson, or surgeon. Perhaps the most striking finding is what does not separate masters from others in their field: innate talent. In his book Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, Geoff Colvin challenges the concept of the “natural,” the idea that top performers are born with something special that enables them to excel. Scott Miller and colleagues at the Institute for the Study of Therapeutic Change came to the same conclusion in their research on outstanding psychotherapists, or “supershrinks.” It turns out that there is wide variation in the effectiveness of clinicians, with some dramatically and consistently outperforming others. However, extensive analyses failed to identify any characteristics — either inherited or acquired — that could account for this difference.

If talent alone doesn’t do the trick, we might think that what matters is experience; maybe the key to excellence is just seeing more clients, attempting more free throws, or running more meetings. In fact, that alone is no guarantee of improvement. Experience does tend to make us feel as though we’ve improved. For instance, as people progress in their careers, their confidence typically continues to grow — even if their rate of success shows no growth at all. That doesn’t mean that experience is not important. Practice is absolutely critical, but not just any practice. The practice must be deliberate.

The term “deliberate practice” comes from psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues, whose work inspired both Geoff Colvin and Scott Miller’s group. The keys to deliberate practice are:

1. an explicit intention to improve performance
2. aiming for objectives just beyond your level of proficiency
3. getting feedback on your results
4. repeating the activity with high frequency and high regularity

Colvin explains how this applies to golf: “Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don't get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day — that's deliberate practice.”

Let’s consider how we might apply these principles to develop mastery of meeting facilitation:

1. Intention to improve: Adjust your mind-set to view each meeting not just as an end in itself, but also as a learning opportunity. Keep an eye out for possible areas of improvement, with the goal of making each meeting better than the last.
2. Aim beyond your level of proficiency: Take the initiative to seek new challenges, working on specific behaviors and interventions that are challenging for you. For instance, if you have a difficult time managing time boundaries, stopping people when they go off on tangents, or intervening when someone interrupts or Yes-buts others, set an explicit intention to practice those skills whenever an opportunity arises.
3. Getting feedback: End every meeting with a Force field, asking the group for Driving forces (what helped them move toward the goals of the meeting) and Restraining forces (what made it more difficult to reach those goals). Work together to come up with strategies for reducing the Restraining forces over time. If you’re co-facilitating with another colleague, we recommend taking some time to debrief together privately, at a deeper level, after the meeting is over. And if you run into situations you don’t know how to handle, it can be very helpful to get outside coaching (as happened in our phone seminar).
4. Repeating the activity: Just keep doing it. Volunteer to facilitate meetings whenever you can — with large groups or small groups, within your team or in other departments. You might also find chances to work with groups in other contexts, such as community meetings or even contentious family discussions.

The data on mastery confirm the difficulty of becoming an expert, in any field. Sustained, deliberate practice is challenging work. However, there is also an inspiring message for those who wish to improve their professional capabilities — whether they aspire to reach the top levels or merely inch up a notch or two. In Geoff Colvin’s words, “what the evidence shouts most loudly is striking, liberating news: that great performance is not reserved for a preordained few. It is available to you and to everyone.” The road to excellence may not be easy, but the path is clearer than ever before, and any one of us can choose to embark on the journey.

Online Resources:
“What It Takes to be Great,” by Geoff Colvin (Fortune Magazine)

“The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” by K. Anders Ericsson et al. (Psychological Review)

“Supershrinks,” by Scott Miller et al. (Psychotherapy Networker)